Name: Welcome to Mortiston, USA!
Game Type: Role-playing Game
Publisher: Scrying Eye Games
Author: Mark Cookman
System: OGL, Outbreak: Undead, Pathfinder Roleplaying Game, Rotworld, Savage Worlds
Setting:
Series:
Theme: Zombie
Type: Core Setting Guide
Release Date: June 2012
Edition: 1st Edition
Description:
THE END IS HERE, AND THE ZOMBIES ARE JUST THE START…
“Welcome to Mortiston, USA” is a zombie apocalypse setting for multiple licensed RPG’s, including Outbreak: Undead, Savage Worlds, The Modern Path for Pathfinder, Rotworld and OGL Modern. You already have zombies, so “Welcome to Mortiston, USA” focuses on the survivors and the city itself. Inside this book you will find 29 detailed locations of interest with people to meet, items to scavenge and monsters to kill, 19 living characters are also detailed with motivations, desires, back-story, items and statistics in all the systems. These characters are not just survivors and strongholds, but major players in the eight factions vying for control of the shattered town. Finally, this book tells a sad story of death and decay spanning 191 days. The changes to the characters and locations during those 191 days are annotated in the individual entries so that each character and location is modified by the changes that occur during the story. So, Welcome to Mortiston, USA not only provides people, places and things, but also how time affects them.
Mortiston needs heroes. If those heroes can’t step up, then in 191 days only the dead and the damned will walk the streets. Or worse…
How can you use it?
Welcome to Mortiston, USA can be used as an overall campaign setting. Individual locations or characters can be used to add to your own campaign setting. The story and the timeline of Mortiston, USA also provide ample scenario ideas for one-time games. The generic nature of the supplement allows Game Masters the freedom to pick and choose what they will use and how they will use it.
What year is this set in?
Welcome to Mortiston, USA is a modern day, post-apocalypse setting. As it is written, it must be set in the 21st century (or later) if the setting is Earth. If you are using the product in a Sci-Fi setting, like Mongoose Traveller or Chaos 6010, then the Tech Level should be equal to or greater than our current “modern day” level.
What happened on Z-Day?
Everything is detailed in the upcoming timeline of events, but in brief: a “terrorist” drives a truck full of cheap, low-tech improvised explosives in front of the deserted Mortiston All School. Inclement weather arrives, hampering the fire fighters; but soon the rain falls and the fire becomes controllable. After a few hours, coincidentally while a military train is moving through Mortiston, a second explosion occurs. This is the detonation of a professionally built suitcase nuke concealed within the truck. Although the yield of this atomic device is very small, it is enough to completely vaporize four city blocks and destroy most of the town with a firestorm that lasts for five days.
What comes in the book?
The chapters in the book breaks down all the important info to make it as easy to find as possible. The main chapters are
- Player’s Map
- Gamemaster’s Map
- Intro to Mortiston
- The Timeline of Z-Day (Four pages of what and when everything happens on Z-Day)
- The Personalities of Mortiston (19 major players in Mortiston)
- Place of Interest in Mortiston (29 detailed locations in Mortiston)
- The Factions of Mortiston (The eight groups that form to save what they can.)
- Post Z-Day Timeline (Details of the 191 days preceding Z-Day)
- Gamemaster’s Notes (Info on the utilities, buildings found by city district, specific locations, weather, and a few special surprises for your players.)
- Maps of Nuke and Firestorm Damage (What does a pocket nuke really do?)
- WWMD? (Not all the monsters are undead in this city.)
- Where do we go next? (What we have in store for Mortiston over the next year or more.)
Publishers Website: http://www.scryingeye.com/
Purchase:
PDF Download DriveThruRPG: Welcome to Mortiston, USA! An All-American Zombie Apocalypse
Released Products/Expansions:
CORE
Welcome to Mortiston, USA! Core Setting Guide
SOURCEBOOKS
Welcome to Mortiston, USA: Extended Electronic Package #1
Welcome to Mortiston, USA!,
The following review was originally posted at Roleplayers Chronicle and can be read in its entirety at http://roleplayerschronicle.com/?p=23169.
Welcome to Mortiston, USA! is a campaign setting guide for a zombie apocalypse that takes place in the city of Mortiston. It is multi-platform and based in a fictional town with no given location so that it can be placed anywhere within the US (most appropriately in the continental US). While the basics of the zombie invasion is obvious, the setting concentrates more on the people, the place, and the given timeline surrounding Mortiston and its new zombie population.
Designed for multi-platform use, Welcome to Mortiston, USA! contains stats covering Savage Worlds, Outbreak: Undead, OGL (d20 Modern), Pathfinder, and Rotworld. This is prevalent in the personalities stats and in some of the location stats. Otherwise the book is written from a very universal stand-point for easy adoption into any system. Even if you don’t want to use those listed, the descriptions contained within provide ample direction to run your own zombie campaign in whatever system you prefer.
OVERALL
Welcome to Mortiston, USA! is a great zombie campaign setting filled with opportunities for memorable game sessions. The best part is that the campaign is not scripted but rather is presented as a large listing of people, places, and events the player characters can interact with and possibly change. The end result is truly dependent upon how the player characters act and react to what’s going on around them.
RATINGS
Publication Quality: 8 out of 10
Welcome to Mortiston, USA! is a good-looking book. The content gets a little squeezed here and there to save space but otherwise looks good. The best feature in regards to quality is that every personality and every location has an accompanying illustration. This really helps to further flesh out the details of the character for any given platform, providing another outlet for flexibility and options to the game master.
Mechanics: 10 out of 10
Keep in mind that Welcome to Mortiston, USA! has plenty of stats for personalities and the ones for Stronghold in the locations section. But that’s not what makes this a 10 out of 10. What makes the mechanics so perfect is that everything within is detailed in a way that the game master can easily translate everything into their own mechanics given the applicable details, descriptions, illustrations, and whatever other information is contained therein. Because the campaign is not scripted from beginning to end, the game master can further translate this into different scales of difficulty depending upon the groups desires.
Desire to Play: 9 out of 10
Welcome to Mortiston, USA! makes a great campaign or at least a great sourcebook. Its presentation makes the campaign setting quite valuable to those wishing to run a zombie apocalypse. By providing stats for different platforms, direct translation into multiple systems is made that much easier. But possibly the most desirable aspect is its flexibility. The player characters are the definite driving factor to the outcome of the campaign, not the campaign setting itself.
Overall: 9 out of 10
If you’re looking for an easy way to jump-start a zombie apocalypse campaign, Welcome to Mortiston, USA! is a valuable resource and campaign setting. It basically has everything you need except for the zombie stats. Just plug-in the zombies you wish to use and away you go!